Sustaining an effective engagement campaign can take a surprising amount of work. You could limit yourself to following the leads from the data you collect, but following without interacting first will get you a very low follow-back ratio. More importantly, if you follow and then forget people, they may follow back, but they’ll soon forget you. A high number of followers who don’t reply to, mention or retweet your account are of no value. True engagement is long-term and repetitive.

The most popular Twitter ranking service, Klout, has used its API platform to boost its growth. The company, which is also expanding outside of Twitter, saw calls to its Klout API more than triple in just a few months. The company is now clearly in the API billionaires club.